Getting Their Clause Into Him

About once a month, one of my boyfriend's two exes will write him a pretty substantive email, and he'll write one back. Though he's open about these emails (and I've seen that they aren't romantic), I'm not comfortable with his remaining a big presence in their lives. How can I get him to stop?

--Anxious

There's a certain kind of woman who can get away with giving a man a list of "undesirables" he cannot associate with -- a woman whose job also involves knocking on his door at random to make him pee in a cup. Assuming your relationship is more boyfriend/girlfriend than parolee/officer of the court, you don't get to give another adult orders. The jealousy that compels you to want to is an evolved impulse -- an internal alarm to help us protect ourselves from being cheated on. However, it's sometimes a false alarm, triggered by insecurity. Chances are, that's what has you referring to a once-a-month email as a "big presence" and failing to parse the difference between "I found them in bed together" and "I found them in Gmail together." (Ooh, "Fifty Shades of Paragraphs." Has her cat thrown up again yet?) If your boyfriend has given you no reason to believe he's violated anything more than the rules of grammar, you should probably focus on bolstering how you feel about you instead of how he's failed to become the sworn enemy of his exes. In fact, you might even see it as a sign of good character that his relationships lead to friendships instead of flames -- as in, his ex-girlfriends roasting marshmallows over the dying embers of his Xbox and Hugo Boss suits on the hood of his BMW.